Preview: Muse at the Schott

Thursday

Feb 28, 2013 at 12:01 AMMar 5, 2013 at 4:50 PM

Bands on the arena circuit often rely on thumps of bass and percussion, blasts of explosions and blinding bursts of brightness from schizoid light shows to pump up their breezy songs. Not so with Muse. Well, maybe the explosions and the lights.

Justin McIntosh, Columbus Alive

Bands on the arena circuit often rely on thumps of bass and percussion, blasts of explosions and blinding bursts of brightness from schizoid light shows to pump up their breezy songs. Not so with Muse. Well, maybe the explosions and the lights.

But with this British rock band, those extraneous elements don't so much prop up the music as complement the great heights to which it aspires. Muse concerts, then, aren't really concerts, so much as transcendent experiences of bombast and flight. With each new album release, Muse digs deeper into that wormhole of sound, shortcutting the distance between Queen and Nirvana, classical and dubstep, George Orwell and Phillip K. Dick.

Many bands explore their, well, muses, but often those endeavors lead to not-so-subtle knock-offs. With Muse, subtlety's not an option, but it's more like singer Matthew Bellamy has conjured the spirits of his influences and blown the whole thing up, leaving the top of your head flapping in the wind like the lid on a kettle. So, yea, it gets kind of crazy.